Jorge Carrigan
A businessman, prosperous and ambitious, determines that it’s time to get married and establish a family at the very moment that a businesswoman, firm and resolute, who has just founded her own company, decides that it’s time to enter into a marriage agreement.
They will meet on a love hotline and choose one another from among 1,000 candidates. They will book their first date for a Thursday night, but she won’t be able to attend the meeting due to work commitments and he will dine alone. The next day, she will go to the same restaurant, but, unfortunately, he won’t be able to attend because he has to fly to Singapore to attend to the operations of a local branch of the multinational for which he works. One week later, he will invite her to the opera, a sublime invitation; but at that time she will be at an international conference taking place in a country in South America. Coincidentally, the opera in question, a sublime work, will also be presented in the most prestigious concert hall in the city where she happens to be, and thus they both will be able to watch the same opera, almost at the same time, although in different venues, and countries; a sublime coincidence.
A month after the first meeting, they will decide to take the relationship to the next step and introduce each other to their respective families. The meeting will take place in the most expensive French restaurant in the city in which they both live, and the reserved table will be as exclusive as the event warrants. Due to business commitments, neither she nor he will be able to be at the dinner that night; nevertheless, their families, all present, will make the necessary introductions and enjoy a pleasant evening together, lacking only the presence of the happy couple. A few months later, in midsummer, the two partners in this new joint venture will decide to take a dream cruise. Fortunately, she will be in Marseilles, fulfilling her role as president of her corporation, and he will be in Santo Domingo on company business, and so she will board a cruise on the incomparable Mediterranean while he will join another around the fascinating islands of the Caribbean and a few Central American ports.
The wedding day will be a magnificent occasion. Fond speeches and ringing bells will call the guests to the celebration. He will be in Sydney, Australia; she will be in Chicago, Illinois. Nevertheless, the marriage rites will be observed just as God intended, simultaneously in two churches on opposite sides of the planet, and the use of big TV screens will enable the couple to see and hear, via satellite, the moment when the other says “I do” before their respective altars.
But two years will pass before they will decide to have their first child. The businessman will go to a sperm bank in Geneva and make the deposit, which will be shipped by air immediately to Montreal, where the businesswoman will be waiting for the insemination to be performed without tiresome delays that could mar the grand occasion. The fertilization will be a success and the pregnancy will progress without complications, with both mother and child registering normal levels of development. It will then be decided, and, barring any unexpected last-minute setbacks, it may indeed come to pass that the businesswoman, firm and resolute, and the businessman, prosperous and ambitious, will meet on the day that their first child is born.
Jorge Carrigan is a Cuban-born writer based in Montreal. He has published works of fiction, poetry and theatre in various publications in Spain, Canada and the United States, and has also published two books: Cascabeles en la punta (Artifact, Toronto, 1999) and Teatro de segunda mano (Versio, Montreal, 2001). His short story “Amor global” originally appeared in Spanish in the anthology Las imposturas de Eros, published by Editorial Lugar Común (Ottawa, 2009).
Translated by Martin Boyd